Dreams from My Father

break down all the time than give up some of their profits. This is how we like to think, you see. Somebody else’s problem.”
    I tossed a stick into the fire. “Attitudes aren’t so different in America,” I told Francis.
    “You are probably right,” he said. “But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”
    At that moment, two Masai approached the fire. Francis welcomed them, and as they sat down on one of the benches, he explained that they would provide security during the night. They were quiet, handsome men, their high cheekbones accentuated by the fire, their lean limbs jutting out of their blood-red
shukas,
their spears stuck into the ground before them, casting long shadows toward the trees. One of them, who said his name was Wilson, spoke Swahili, and he told us that he lived in a
boma
a few miles to the east. His silent companion began to pan the darkness with the beam of his flashlight, and Auma asked if the camp had ever been attacked by animals. Wilson grinned.
    “Nothing serious,” he said. “But if you have to go to the bathroom at night, you should call one of us to go with you.”
    Francis began to question the men about the movement of various animals, and I drifted away from the fire to glance up at the stars. It had been years since I’d seen them like this; away from the lights of the city, they were thick and round and bright as jewels. I noticed a patch of haze in the otherwise clear sky and stepped farther away from the fire, thinking perhaps it was the smoke, then deciding that it must be a cloud. I was wondering why the cloud hadn’t moved when I heard the sound of footsteps behind me.
    “I believe that’s the Milky Way,” Mr. Wilkerson said, looking up at the sky.
    “No kidding.”
    He held up his hand and traced out the constellations for me, the points of the Southern Cross. He was a slight, soft-spoken man with round glasses and pasty blond hair. Initially I had guessed he spent his life indoors, an accountant or professor. I noticed, though, as the day had passed, that he possessed all sorts of practical knowledge, the kinds of things I had never got around to knowing but wished that I had. He could talk at length with Francis about Land Rover engines, had his tent up before I drove in my first stake, and seemed to know the name of every bird and every tree that we saw.
    I wasn’t surprised, then, when he told me that he had spent his childhood in Kenya, on a tea plantation in the White Highlands. He seemed reluctant to talk about the past; he said only that his family had sold the land after independence and had moved back to England, to settle in a quiet suburb of London. He had gone to medical school, then practiced with the National Health Service in Liverpool, where he had met his wife, a psychiatrist. After a few years, he had convinced her to return with him to Africa. They had decided against living in Kenya, where there was a surplus of doctors relative to the rest of the continent, and instead settled on Malawi, where they both had worked under government contract for the past five years.
    “I oversee eight doctors for a region with a population of half a million,” he told me now. “We never have enough supplies—at least half of what the government purchases ends up on the black market. So we can only focus on the basic, which in Africa is really what’s needed anyway. People die from all sorts of preventable disease. Dysentery. Chicken pox. And now AIDS—the infection rate in some villages has reached fifty percent. It can be quite maddening.”
    The stories were grim, but as he continued to tell me the tasks of his life—digging wells, training outreach workers to inoculate children, distributing condoms—he seemed neither cynical nor sentimental. I asked him why he thought he had come back to Africa and he answered without a pause, as if he’d heard the question many times.
    “It’s my home, I suppose. The people, the land…” He took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “It’s funny, you know. Once you’ve lived here for a time, the life in England seems terribly cramped. The British have so much more, but seem to enjoy things less. I felt a foreigner there.”
    He put his glasses back on and shrugged. “Of course, I know that in the long run I need to be replaced. That’s part of my job—making myself unnecessary. The Malawian doctors I work with are excellent, really. Competent.